Brief Introduction
Joomla's interface and administrative controls work from the web browser, meaning that the Joomla site can be accessed from anywhere. Any capabilities that the default Joomla setup does not have can be added easily from the collection of extensions made available by developers online. Extensions can enable your Joomla site to do just about anything it needs to with a minimum of effort. The biggest benefit is that Joomla is incredibly easy to learn: once you have created your new site in Joomla, your client could catch on with a small amount of instruction. If you know that Joomla is the right solution for you, then the next step will be choosing how you want to set it up.
How to Install Joomla
There are three ways to start working with Joomla.
One - Set up Joomla using a web host provider.
You might already have a web host, or you might be considering one, with or without Joomla-optimized servers. You do have some options here: your host might have what is called a 'one-click' or 'one-touch' solution to set up your Joomla site, or you could upload the Joomla files to your space on the server and configure Joomla yourself. You might have to do some tinkering with the MySQL and PHP services your host provides you, but it does offer you a little more control, such as assuring that you are using the latest version of Joomla. Using your web host's Joomla features might be the easiest way to start using Joomla.
Two - Set up Joomla using the XAMPP package.
From the website, XAMPP is a distribution of the Apache HTTP web server already containing the MySQL database, PHP and Perl engines. This means that instead of configuring each technology by itself, XAMPP is a simple package format that executes and installs on your system with minimal hassle. This example, however, assumes that your Joomla site will not be 'live'. XAMPP is a web server, and while you can host your own website using this method, it is not very secure. XAMPP was designed to be a development environment for testing purposes, and therefore your Joomla install would also be just a test. From what I have read on the subject, the XAMPP installer is very simple, especially in the binary executable version for Windows, so if you want to get your feet wet with Joomla and the accompanied server-side technologies PHP and MySQL, this is the way to go.
Three - Set up Joomla using individual technologies (Apache, MySQL, PHP).
Mentioned before, while XAMPP is a neat little package, you can install all of these technologies on your own. You need the Apache HTTP server, MySQL database, and PHP engine to run Joomla. This sounds simple at first but the majority of your time spent working with this method will be configuring each individual technology to work well with the others. It is a manual install of everything, but to make your life simpler you could read up on the versions of each technology that XAMPP is using. Chances are that if you follow XAMPP as a guideline for which version of each technology you should use, the less troubleshooting you will have to do, and if all goes well everything will play nice together. The benefit to a manual install of each technology is that you get exactly what you need. XAMPP is nice, but it installs much more than Joomla requires. It is the hardest way to start with Joomla, but it does give you what you need without anything extra.
Other Things to Consider
Here are the minimum technical requirements for Joomla 1.5.x -
- Apache 1.3
- PHP 4.3.10
- MySQL 3.23
If you run into any glitches or problems during setup, one resource you can try is the forums hosted at the official Joomla site:
http://forum.joomla.org/
You might have some luck using the name of your web host provider in your search.
Resources
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